We Can Work It Out
by lurknomoar
Summary: A portrait of the five protagonists of Takin' Over The Asylum from the point of view of outsiders: a record shop customer, a taxi driver, a child, a student of electrical engineering and a tabby cat.


Author's note: if you are not familiar with the original material of Takin' Over the Asylum, let me warn you that this story contains mentions of alcoholism, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, depression, suicide, suicidal ideation, and people self-identifying as loonies with cheerful defiance.

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**Eddie**

Jamie needed to get her something good this time, something better than the box of chocolates he came up with for Valentine's day. It was their one-year anniversary after all, even though he really wished that it wasn't a special occasion. It's not that he didn't love Patti, he really, really did, it's just that those feelings didn't translate into an ability to buy her gifts she would like. And her taste in music, god, he could not even fathom it, with all that weird old sixties crap. She wasn't even alive in the sixties, neither of them was! He had spent twenty goddamned minutes in this record shop without finding anything that would make a nice enough present.

'May I help you, sir?' the man who asked was about his father's age, maybe a bit younger, and seemed ill at ease in his uniform t-shirt. His nametag said Eddie.

'What?'

'You've been standing in the soul section for a rather long while, and you are making faces like you want to murder everyone who ever touched a guitar. Thought I could help.'

'I want to buy something for my girlfriend.' Jamie explained, 'She loves soul, and I don't know a thing about it.'

The man, Eddie, actually cracked his knuckles.

'Let's get to work then, shall we?'

In the next few minutes, he learned far more about old-timey music than he ever wanted to know, but it was worth it. Eddie asked questions about the music Patti liked – more drum or less drum, male voice or female voice - sorting through vinyl discs all the while. Eventually they managed to narrow down the huge piles of records Eddie brought out to a single one – a relatively rare recording of 'Come to Me Softly' by a band called Jimmy James and the Vagabonds. The very title sounded ominously romantic, but Jamie gave up and resigned to buying it anyway.

As Eddie walked him over to the till, it occurred to him that the man never even looked at the records while spouting information about them – dates of recording and positions in charts and all sorts of trivia, rattled off with utter certainty about every single one of at least three dozens of songs.

'How come you know all this?' he asked before he could think better of it.

'I… I used to be a DJ.' Eddie answered, a little wistful, 'Got fired. Then got fired again. Now I work here.'

'So sorry, man.' said Jamie, and meant it.

'Don't be.' said the man agreeably, 'This job pays the bills, and once in a while we get good customers, ones who asks questions other than 'can I get a discount?'

Jamie laughed a little, paid for his single record, and started to walk away. But suddenly something occurred to him, and he turned back.

'You said you were a DJ, right?'

Eddie nodded tentatively.

'How about you come DJ for us? We are having a party next Friday, it's the birthday of my mate Andy, and we have no DJ apart from Pete, and Pete is atrocious.'

'What would I look like, showing up at a party full of college students?'

'Aw, please!'

'What can you pay me?' asked Eddie, challenging.

'Nothing.' Admitted Jamie, 'Would you do it for free drinks?'

For a moment, Eddie really looked tempted. He opened his mouth, closed it, took a step back, shook his head a little, and Jamie was slightly baffled. How could it be this difficult to decide whether or not to go to a party?

'I can't drink.' said Eddie finally, 'My wife would be heartbroken.'

Jamie had the strange feeling this was a rehearsed phrase, something Eddie had to say a lot.

'You're married?' asked Jamie for the lack of a better thing to say.

'Sort of.' Said Eddie, sounding a little more natural, 'My grandmother insisted we get legally married, but we don't live together yet.'

'Sounds like and interesting story.' Said Jamie warily.

'And your party sounds fun, so go have a good time.' answered Eddie, 'And play that record for your girlfriend. If she doesn't love it, I'll take it back, and repay you out of pocket.'

Jamie nodded and walked away, already calculating the price of a restaurant dinner, trying to come up with a place where he could afford a three-course meal without utterly bankrupting himself. Maybe that place with the flowers in the little jars? By the time evening rolled around, he hardly remembered the man who sold him the vinyl.

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**Campbell**

Gordon had been a taxi driver for twenty years, and he has seen some strange customers in his time, strange enough that these days he was hardly surprised at anything. Therefore he didn't even bat an eyelid when two young men half-fell into his car, their hair wet with sleet. The taller one was Campbell Bain, the radio DJ. Gordon could tell, because he shouted

'Campbell Bain, radio DJ extraordinaire at your service!' the very second he entered the car.

'Just drive.' said the short one quietly, 'Take us to Barholm square.'

'C'mon, it's not even midnight yet, why are we going home?' argued Campbell, as Gordon started the car.

'Cause I'm soaking wet and dead tired, and the only reason you are not registering cold or exhaustion is that you are high as a kite on your own brain chemistry.'

'Hey, I'm stable, I have a paper about it, all stamped and signed and blessed by the holy medical bureaucracy! Also I've been taking all the pills you're pestered me into taking.'

'I didn't pester you, Campbell, you decided to take them because you said the other ones made you feel fuzzy.'

'And these just make me fat. Tell me in solemn seriousness, can you imagine me continuing the shining upward arc of my career with an extra two hundred pounds?'

'You're on the radio, Campbell. Your voice is bloody gorgeous and nobody can tell what you look like.'

'Yeah, yeah, but what if the extra weight of the lard on my chest makes me sound different?' Said the boy, sounding genuinely worried, 'Will, what if I end up growing bosoms?'

'We will cross that bridge when we come to it.'

'No we won't cause I'll be heavy enough to cause structural damage to the bridge in question, and also I'll look like an old lady and I'll get fired and people will point at me in the street and they will all say _there goes Campbell Bain, he could have been the best DJ in the history of the world if only he hadn`t grown bosoms _and I will just tell them it was the fault of Will McKenzie who convinced him that the ability to distinguish appropriate and inappropriate situations to impersonate Elvis in was worth the price of gaining weight like a prize pig and still being hungry all the time!'

By the time he finished, his voice was a shrill shriek, and he was gesticulating with both hands so wildly that Gordon considered telling him to stop obscuring the rear view mirror.

'It didn't bother me that you were singing A Little Less Conversation at four in the morning.' said the other one with a sigh, 'That part was actually quite nice. It bothered me that you did it standing on the railing of the balcony on the eleventh floor.'

'You don't get to tell me what to do!'

'I do when it concerns me!' snapped back the young man named Will, seemingly losing his composure for the first time.

'You're not my father!'

'No I'm not, you want me to fetch him?'

'…no.' said Campbell, suddenly quiet as if the air had been punched out of him.

'Sorry.' said Will, hesitantly contrite, 'It's selfish of me to want to go home, and you know you don't have to come with me if you don't want to. But you've been awake for forty-eight hours, and I really wish you made a controlled descent as opposed to crashing, and that would probably be easier if it happened in the vicinity of your own bed.'

Campbell grinned, and it was obvious even in the rear view mirror that he meant it to look cunning, not as artless and eager as it did.

'Yeah, let's go home then.' he said, 'Step on the gas, mister. And Will, if I decide you've been nice to me I'll do a Freddy Mercury impersonation for the delight and delectation for my highly esteemed audience of one, yeah, that is you, and just because I like you I will keep away from sheer drops, electrical outlets and potentially harmful kitchen appliances while I give you the timeless classics Tie Your Mother Down and Get Down Make Love.

'You really are a fucking loony.' said Will, but he sounded sort of fond.

'That where you're wrong, see?' countered Campbell, 'You are the one who's fucking a loony.'

Gordon heard a snorting half-laugh, then silence, and sure enough, the next time he glanced into the mirror he saw that the two young men were kissing. He couldn't say he was especially fond of queers, but he has seen far worse happen in the back of his car, so he decided not to say anything about it. At least now they were quiet, and the taller of the boys, that Campbell, has stopped his shaky fidgeting and focused entirely on the boy who was kissing the daylights out of him, so objectively that must have been a good thing. Gordon shrugged and drove on in the night.

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**Rosalie**

Jenny knew she shouldn't have been so curious about the people who lived in the big stone house. Mommy had said that the people who lived in Hill Crest were all loonies and junkies, and they were dangerous. But the lady walking up to the door with two huge bags of groceries didn't seem dangerous. She just seemed tired – she put her bags down on the grown and straightened up slowly, trying to get her breath back. Jenny watched her from behind a tree, but when she didn't do anything remarkably crazy, she decided she would ask. She was already eight, and she wasn't scared of anything, not even creepy crawlies, so she could definitely walk up to the lady in the grey coat.

'Excuse me, ma'am.' she said, minding her manners, 'Are you a loony?'

'Well, I don't know.' the lady answered, seemingly confused by the question, 'The people here would probably say that I am.'

'Why?' asked Jenny, absently noting that the lady smelled a little like disinfectant, 'Did you murder somebody?'

'No.' said the lady, 'I'm here because I'm afraid of germs, and I like things to be really, really neat and tidy. I clean a lot.'

It occurred to Jenny that she seemed a little sad, and not the slightest bit scary.

'That's not being a loony.' argued Jenny, 'Grandma loves cleaning too.'

'Well, I guess your Grandma doesn't get upset if she finds a speck of dried dirt on the windowpane.'

'When you're upset, do you murder people?' asked Jenny hopefully.

'No. I just cry a bit.'

Jenny rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet as she was thinking. Either this kind-voiced quiet-smiled lady was lying, or Mommy must have been wrong about Hill Crest. She had to find out more.

'Have you always been a loony?'

'No, not always.' said the lady, slow and thoughtful, 'For many years, though.'

'Will it go away?'

'I'm afraid not. But with hard work and time and some luck it should get easier.'

'What does it feel like, being a loony?'

'You know how to ask the hard questions!' chided the lady, but she was smiling. 'Sometimes it stops me from doing the things I want to do, sometimes it helps me do them better, but sometimes I'm not even sure I still want the things I would really want. Sometimes it hurts a little bit.'

It has never occurred to Jenny that being a loony hurt, Mommy and he friends only ever talked about loonies hurting others. But she supposed it made sense. She remembered the nightmares she had, about the creepy crawlies that came for her. If the creepy crawlies were still there when you were awake, and made you cry, even though you were a grown-up… well, that must have been really bad. Suddenly she was sorry she even asked, and loonyness seemed less fun and exciting, and more like a sad grown-up thing. She wanted to say something kind to the sad clean lady, but she couldn't come up with anything.

'What's in the bags?' she asked instead.

'Just my groceries. Bread and milk and margarine and vegetables and apples and a box of cocoa powder, because we ran out.'

Loonies liked cocoa too. That was strangely comforting. And talking to this lady was really nice, too. Most grown-ups talked to her as if she was still a dumb little baby, not a big girl who could already read, and most children her age threw their textbooks at her, and this lady was a loony, but she was also really interesting.

'I really like cocoa too.' she volunteered, 'You could make me some.'

'That would be really nice.' the lady answered, 'But your parents wouldn't be happy about you visiting someone at Hill Crest.'

'Cos you're a loony?'

'Cos I'm a loony.' nodded the lady, again with a sad smile.

'How about I come to the door and you bring my cocoa down?' said Jenny, grinning at her own genius at having come up with the idea.

'Why not.' mused the lady, 'If you want a chat or some cocoa, just press the bell on the main door. I'm in flat five, but if somebody else picks up, you can just ask for Rosalie.'

'My name is Jenny.' said Jenny, 'It's been nice talking to you, but I have to go home now or my Mommy will be angry.'

'Run along then.' said Rosalie, then raised her right hand and slowly, stiffly patted Jenny's head.

Jenny ran along, but promised herself she's be back for cocoa the very next day.

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**Fergus**

'Fergus MacKinnon.' said Katie, instead of hello.

'Who?' asked David. He would never admit it, but he was really hoping she would give him a good excuse to call it a day – his eyes stung already, he felt tired and a little sick, and not at all like working into the night as he was supposed to.

'Fergus MacKinnon.' she intoned, 'You told me to look up if anyone else worked on your little engineering problem before, and I found this one bloke who had a similar experimental project and wrote about in the uni newspaper. His name is Fergus McKinnon.'

'Did he figure it out?' he asked hopefully, staring hopefully up at her from where he was sitting cross-legged on the floor of his dorm room, surrounded by a system of wiring that was starting to look confusing even to him.

'No idea. The article is really short, basically all he says is that he is working on it.'

'Let's ask him then.' said David, standing up and stretching with an obscenely loud groan, 'He probably won't throw out two desperate undergraduates if we just beg prettily enough.'

'Begging wouldn't be much use.' sighed Katie, 'The man died about a year ago.'

'Dammit.' swore David, looking around for something to punch that wouldn't get broken and set back his project for weeks. 'Did you have to get my hopes up?'

'Sorry.' She said, but she didn't sound really sorry, she just sounded upset.

'Is there something else?' he asked, fully knowing he was crap at comforting people.

'It's just that – I did some more digging to see if he wrote anything else about this before he died, and I looked and looked and there was nothing, or at least nothing that was published. Only two obituaries. A very dry one, paid for by his family, and a longer one months later, signed 'Hospital Radio St. Jude.'

'Isn't St Jude the name of that loony bin?'

'I'm getting to that, David.' said Katie, and he could tell from the tight strictness in her voice that she really was upset, 'This man Fergus graduated from uni, worked for a few years for this firm in Inverness, and then – then something went wrong and he ended up in St Jude's.'

'He went crazy?'

'He had schizophrenia. And he was in there for more than two years. And then they let him out. And then he killed himself.'

'Because they let him out?'

'I don't know.' said Katie tiredly, 'The second obituary said it was because his medical record made him unemployable, and for him that meant that there was no future anyway.'

David didn't know what to say about the strange death of a stranger, so he said nothing.

'He was only twenty-seven.' continued Katie, 'It's not fair.'

'What isn't?'

'That crap like this happens to people. It really shouldn't.'

'No, it shouldn't, but now we should either get back to work or call it a day.'

'It's just…' she started, uncertainly, and he knew her well enough to wait it out when she had one of her slow-burning ideas. 'It's just I'm thinking that sort of thing could happen to anyone.'

'Not anyone, Katie.' said David, giving up and trying to be comforting. 'He was a psychiatric patient, a lunatic.'

'Yeah, he was a lunatic at twenty-five, but as far as I can tell he was fine and dandy at twenty-four. Now tell me, David, how old are we?'

'…twenty-one.' said the young man reluctantly.

'Yeah. I bet when Fergus McKinnon was twenty-one and in the top tenth of his class, he didn't think he was gonna wake up hearing voices or something.'

'So what are you gonna do? Spend the next ten years patiently waiting for a visit from the little blue men from Mars?'

'No.' she said, 'But we have to do _something._'

He knew better than to argue with her when she got like this – on one hand she was impossible to reason with, on the other her ideas often ended up surprisingly good.

'We could do something.' she repeated, 'Just for us, folks on the campus. Look out for each other.'

'Protect each other from alien abduction?'

She gave a weak chuckle.

'Maybe.' she agreed, 'But more like – just putting the idea out there. Make people talk about it. And if people talk about it, then maybe we can get people help when they need it and before it's too late, and we can make sure they can get back to work or school or whatever once they are better. I don't know, I don't even know where to start.'

'The Engineering Faculty would be a good place.' answered David thoughtfully. 'And I know this girl at the campus news, she'll probably let me publish anything as long as it's decently written and has no bad words in it. You could throw together an article about this Fergus, saying that this guy was a pretty good electrical engineer, and then he went crazy, and then he died and now we can't go to him for help with our homework and that is wrong.'

'I could do that.' nodded Katie, standing up, 'But for now, let's call it a day, shall we?'

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**Francine**

The big-haired woman smelled sad, the saddest he had ever smelled. She lived in a room in the big stone house, and Whiskers had leapt in through the open window, chasing the smell of warm milk wafting down onto the courtyard. He was never shy about approaching humans, acting friendly and letting himself be petted and cuddled in hope of treats, but this time he recoiled. The smell of bitter smoke and salt tears and stale fear-sweat hit him like a physical blow, and he could immediately tell that the woman was unwell. She was crouched over on her bed, crying and rocking and shaking so hard she seemed unable to move of her own will. Her left hand was clutched tightly around something he couldn't see. She making little sounds, sounds like that kitten made, the kitten with the broken leg he once saw, that had died soon after, and he jumped over the bed just to see what was going on, to find out whether or not she was going to die.

He smelled no blood, and she did not seem wounded, but when she felt the bedclothes rustle underneath his paws she startled. She carefully raised her head to stare at him for a long moment, she was motionless like a predator but her eyes were empty with fear like the eyes of prey. Then she extended her right hand and scratched him right behind the ears, just the way he liked it. There was a cold yellow ring on one finger, but other than that her hand was perfect. He turned her head into her palm, and she kept on stroking, her hurried panicked breathing slowly evening out. Then she started talking, and although he knew she probably wasn't talking to him he listened as attentively as he could, purring all the while.

He was on the verge of falling asleep when she got up and returned with a plastic cup full of nice, creamy milk. She tried to make him drink from the cup, but it was too deep, and no matter how he struggled, he couldn't fit his face into it. So she took the cup, poured a little of the milk into her cupped hand, and let him lap it up from there. Slowly she fed him the entire cup, and he felt comfortably full. He hopped off the bed, and slowly picked his way towards the window. She stroked his back one last time, then let him jump up on the windowsill and leave through the roof. Once he was down on the ground, he could see her still watching him from the window. Then she bent her arm back, and threw something after him. At first he ran away from the projectile, but then curiosity got the better of him, and he sneaked up to it to sniff it and look at it. It was a human thing he had seen before, and he even knew what it was – a pair of nail scissors.

He spent the day patrolling the nearby woods and parks, but when night fell, he thought he would have another look at the sad-smelling woman with the warm hands, the woman who gave him milk. He made his way up to the open window and jumped in, but this time the woman wasn't alone. There was a man with him, a tired-smelling man who must have eaten a corned-beef sandwich and driven a car. She was talking to him, and the words she said must have been words of great sadness, because she started crying again and he cried too. But then she said other words, her eyes glancing at the window, and then she smiled, and he smiled too. And then he touched her shoulder, slow and scared like a cat in rival territory, trying to pass unharmed, but she let him, and they held each other close, and he was talking to her still, murmuring the same words into her hair over and over again.

He could smell no milk in the room this time, but for a few more minutes, he didn't feel like leaving. Those two humans smelled so very good together that he couldn't help wanting to bask in it. The sad-smelling woman smelled less sad, the tired-smelling man smelled less tired, and both of them smelled like a soft peaceful place to curl up in, like protected territory and plentiful food, like waking up alert in the middle of the day and going back to sleep because the danger was just a shadow and the sun is still warm on the cobblestones.

They smelled like home, and like hope.


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